Matt Morrison wrote:I busted out a nice 301, impressing Jim and particularly Jon in a way I didn’t quite expect

Ha, I think I know what you mean here, and it's something I thought about later too. I think I was impressed mainly because I've always considered quiz machines to be tighter than a nun's cunt (see Buzzwords cheating thread), plus I'd've played that Bully "just darts" (gonna be okay, do-do-doo-ooh, just darts spin that record babe, do-do-doo-ooh - yeah, scratch your heads, music snobs) game myself to see if it was "doable with skill" (see Buzzwords cheating thread) and doubtless written it off. So yeah, it was impressive in that sense.

(If we had a time machine or you could somehow find a JPM Red Arrow machine, I could probably impress you back, skillstopping reels doing > 1 rev per second and things like that. Actually since you're into that kind of thing, there are some really good JPM Impact emulators + ROMs knocking about the web.)

Good write-up though mate, I kinda wanted to do something similar but in truth I couldn't really be arsed, plus it's difficult (impossible?) to convey some of the stuff with words, like the Newark station masters. It's a cliche, but you had to be there.

(Edit: PS - I think 'PORTIA' was the only one of those "Planetary Moons" that I did get - my strategy for that is basically to go through the first verse of 'Far Out' by Blur and hope to get lucky. You'd be forgiven for thinking my success rate was higher based on my leaning towards the category.)

By the way, if anyone was wondering where all the bedroom action was in that epic post, it wasn't an omission, nor was it a rare moment of tact by Matt, there just wasn't any. None at all, not a sausage.
And come to think of it, there hasn't been any in the fucking week it took him to write that post.
Frustrated, London.

Heather Badcock wrote:By the way, if anyone was wondering where all the bedroom action was in that epic post, it wasn't an omission, nor was it a rare moment of tact by Matt, there just wasn't any. None at all, not a sausage.
And come to think of it, there hasn't been any in the fucking week it took him to write that post.
Frustrated, London.

I've just had an email from East Coast trains saying that they're running a direct service from London to Lincoln from May 22nd. Not sure how many though but this may be good news for those, like Jono, travelling from the London direction.

Kirk Bevins wrote:I've just had an email from East Coast trains saying that they're running a direct service from London to Lincoln from May 22nd. Not sure how many though but this may be good news for those, like Jono, travelling from the London direction.

Me too, obviously the masses of people going from London to attend COLIN have skewed their projections.

He looks tired. You must have been waiting for the train for ages; people only fall asleep standing up when they are extremely tired - like him on that photo. He must have been having a good dream too, smiley faced man.

One Direction are my life. <3
"The reason for life is to find out who you are"
"It always seems impossible until it's done"
Love loads of celebs to be honest... Might marry Nicky Maccy

For those (i.e. none) who are interested, I just did a quick stats run of the event and came up with a few interesting results. Before I proceed, I should stress that games against bots count toward individual scores but not toward whole-event averages.

In total, 95 different people have attended COLIN over its seven years- 4 of whom have competed in all four events, and 53 of whom have only played at the one. COLIN 2011 saw 13 new people participate- which is actually down from 2010 which had 16 new players (but way up from the 9 new players in 2009).

After six years of dominance, Chris Wills has been displaced from the top of the 'highest average score from all COLINs combined' chart- his 61.6 ppg has been trumped by (who else) Jack Hurst's 62.2. Jack scored 386 points this year- the highest of anyone- which has tied the COLIN 'total points from six games' record for about the fourth time. A bit more from the 'highest average from all COLINs'- James Robinson has jumped straight in at third in the list with an average of 60.5, whilst Kai has elevated himself to fourth with an average of 59.7.

The average winning score from COLIN 2011 was 58- down by a tiny margin from 2009 and 2010. The average losing score, however, was 40.3- the first time it's ever creeped above 40, and the average score from the event was 49.2, by far the highest it's ever been. And I think you can probably guess which game had the highest winning and losing scores (both COLIN records, the latter of which by an absolute country mile).

Jon Corby wrote:I dunno if I actually said it at all, but I lost count the number of times I was thinking to myself "I just fucking love this, this is awesome" on Saturday night.

This. The whole thing was touching as fuck.

Jon Corby wrote:I don't want to go into naming people right now as I'm meant to be keeping this brief, but MWM & Heather. Great times. Fucking love you guys. How cool is it that Countdown has brought you together? How doubly cool is it that I got to muscle in on it for a weekend?

Meant to reply to this sooner - probably should do so by PM, but fuck it, let's publicly jack each other off. You were fantastic. We both enjoyed your company A LOT. It was quite interesting that one of the first notable things we said to each other over the weekend was that we barely spent any time in each other's company further than "hello"s at Colon. To me that just somehow proves that this Internet stuff is alright and not completely mental, not completely false and unreal. BFFs.

Also, did you get your muscle in on it? I didn't notice, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Quoted to remind Jon Corby that he is a nice person and that he misses everyone and everyone misses him.